Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 5, Issue -2, 1 August 2020 | Page 17

because it is an illusion. But when you stop and feel the sun’s presence
shining on your skin already, you will no longer chase anything.
It is difficult for us, as mind-oriented beings, to become conscious of our
thoughts, as we have been conditioned to identify with them since a young
age. But once we can observe our thoughts and how they tend to sabotage
our happiness, we will experience true spiritual growth.
Below I want to share with you eleven of the most common traps that we fall
into on the spiritual path. I have personally experienced these pitfalls many
times, and they have resulted in a lot of pain and struggle. See how many of
these traps you can identify with:

1. The trap of spiritual bypassing
Spiritual bypassing is the practice of using spirituality to avoid, suppress or
escape from certain emotions or situations in life. Common types of spiritual
bypassing include:

• numbing one’s emotions through “spiritualised” repression and
avoidance
• unhealthy obsession and attachment to the positive (e.g.positive
thinking) and adopting a passive-aggressive “nice” mask
• debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow self
• anger-phobia
• weak personal boundaries
• blind or excessively tolerant compassion (to the detriment of oneself
and the other)
• forcefully trying to”kill the ego” and condemning it as “bad/evil”
• exaggerated detachment
• getting stuck in theoretical spirituality and dogmatic beliefs about
“truth”
• denial of self-responsibility by placing it on another higher being (e.g.
spirit-guide angel)